Seven Wanders of 2020

Predictably, it was all British hikes last year. No European cities or the mountain lakes of home. Still, I’m lucky to live with countryside a mile away, to step out my door and choose a walking circuit of 3.5, 4.5, or 6 miles.

Weeks went by when we weren’t allowed even to drive a few minutes and explore Somewhere Else. Temporary easing of restrictions assigned extra value to sojourns that might otherwise not have been so memorable. And when we couldn’t travel, we could look to rainbows or holiday decorations. I think the people who put out massive displays of festive lights and inflatables by the third week of November, brightening the long nights, deserve to have a street named after them.

Dursley: Our Own Town

We’ve been familiar with the local hills for some time, but lockdown meant perusing churchyards, looking up name origins, finding the rare street less homogenous and more individualised than others.

Living in houses squished right up next to each other is hard. The constant reminders of other people practically on top of you, it’s exhausting. And when we fled for our daily walk, there were always a number of people doing the same. My son and I discovered more paths to the river (now more of a stream) and I may have gone mad without access to water in nature. Every day I incorporate the river in my walk, take my headphones off when I reach it, tell it hello, listen to its hurried reply, and imagine I could be on a riverbank anywhere in the world, letting it drown out the traffic and forgetting there are houses lined up on either bank.

Stroud Area: Selsley and Thrupp, A Few Miles Afield

My office is in Stroud so I used to go to this vegan hippie haven every day, walking the canal towpaths, listening to street musicians, frequenting little shops. For 3/4 of this year we could barely go at all. But our first journey out of town (by 7 or 8 miles) in the summer was to Selsley Common to see the dinosaurs, and my husband and I took a couple of canal walks later.

Woodchester: Local Lakes

Where I grew up every little rural town has its own lake plus various other ponds. That’s how you cool off in the summer. Over here, despite this Island being known for rainfall, there aren’t many accessible bodies of water. We had a couple of hikes (as did many others it would seem) at Woodchester, a National Trust estate with pretty combinations of wooded hills and manmade lakes, guarded by an unfinished gothic-style mansion which is pretty much the sort of place I intend to set my next novel.

Liverpool: Street Art and Maritime History

We managed to get a serious road trip in before this vibrant, friendly city was put into higher tier restrictions. With masks and constantly sanitised hands we explored museums to inspire whole fleets of stories: a branch of the Tate filled with modern art, the International Museum of Slavery, and the Maritime Museum. The grand if faded buildings still convey the city’s impressive history as emigration gateway and meeting place of cultures.

Charmouth, Seatown, and the Dorset Jurassic Coast

Plan E to celebrate my 40th in December was a cottage near the sea and fossil-hunting under the coastal cliffs. Plans A and B would have involved seeing my family in the US—I haven’t had a birthday with them since I turned 23. In the end, we were incredibly fortunate just to have this break 2 hours away, as it fell in the 3 weeks between Lockdown the Second and The Raising of the Tiers. And although the weather was generally poor, it left plenty of fossils to be found.

Combe Martin and North Devon’s Cliffs

As soon as the hospitality industry re-opened slightly in July, we went, for my first days off from work in months. Just to a cottage and lots of isolated hikes, mind you, no crowded beaches or anything like that. We love a bit of rock-scrambling and tide-pooling. The coastline in North Devon is pretty dramatic and made for good, even sunny, adventures.

Grasmere and Easedale Tarn: Proper Lakes

The main bit of our autumn road trip was spent a fair way North, in a Lake District shepherd’s hut with no electricity or running water. We hit Liverpool and the brief luxury of a half-empty hotel on our way back down. The Lake District is special for its own ancient landscape and language: fells and tarns and ghylls. Of course we hiked around Wast Water, England’s deepest lake at the foot of its sharpest peaks, and we visited lovely pubs and bakeries and came away with gingerbread and a glorious painting by Libby Edmondson. Our very favourite hike, though, was an unexpectedly bright afternoon walking along a beautiful purple-black river and ascending up to one of the glacial ponds, Easedale Tarn.

Did you get to do much exploring in 2020? If not, did you find anything special and new in your own local area?

Graffiti: Art in the Wild

This Week’s Bit of String: A beloved chicken farmer

In a small New Hampshire town during the 80s, graffiti appeared on a slab of roadside rock: ‘CHICKEN FARMER, I LOVE YOU.’ Legend has it, the message was directed at a girl living on the small chicken farm across the street, from a shy boy perhaps in her class.

About twenty years later, a revised message, similarly handpainted, appeared: ‘CHICKEN FARMER, I STILL LOVE YOU.’chicken-farmer

Awww, you know? Awww. The story appears here in Atlas Obscura, and the entry describes the message as ‘a less personal but more public way of reaching out…’

The paradox of personal and public is an intriguing aspect of graffiti and street art. And that paradox affects us as writers too, essentially in reverse. Street artists preserve their anonymity but bring their work right in front of everyone; as authors we (assuming we don’t use a pen name) give up our anonymity but depend on readers’ choice as to whether our work gets seen or not.

So what can writers learn from street art and graffiti?

Resourcefulness

Some of my favourite examples of street art select a feature of the urban landscape and create a whole work around it. A couple pieces from Bristol:

Smiley Windows, Bristol
Simple, but fun…

 

Girl with the Pearl Earring painted around an alarm box on a building in Bristol
This street artist saw an alarm box on a wall and apparently thought it would make a great pearl earring in a big, monochromatic version of the famous Vermeer.

It’s sort of an artist’s form of gathering bits of string, you might say, and I’m a big fan.

What a Difference a Letter Makes

In high school in the late 90s, I was tickled by a revised carving on a classroom desk. Someone had cut ‘MANSON FOREVER’ onto the surface, but someone else had mocked it by transforming it with a simple scratch into ‘HANSON FOREVER.’ Doesn’t sound quite so badass does it?

As a TA, I found some similarly misguided graffiti scratched on a table in a Science classroom: ‘Praise Satin.’

Typical of the devil’s insidiousness that his name would be easily conflated with a luxurious fabric.

Now, these entries aren’t art, according to any definitions discussed in earlier blog posts. But I do find them entertaining, and as writers we appreciate the importance of words—these silly ones remind us how essential each letter actually is.

Community Engagement

Street art on Bristol high rise
More street art from Bristol. If these figures could talk…

In Detroit, as in more and more cities around the world, there’s an annual Street Art Festival during which many different artists are given their own wall, each, to work on. Some use it to commemorate important figures of the area, to express the pain of the Black Lives Matter movement, or to remind citizens of vanished neighbourhoods. In this Huffington Post piece, Festival director Roula David describes their aims: to be ‘significant for the community as opposed to just putting pretty things on pretty buildings.’

In Belfast, murals honour many of the victims killed there during the Troubles. I learned about this thanks to a great post on Sandy Bennett-Haber’s blog. She refers to street art as a conversation between artist and environment, and also ‘a broad conglomeration of stories about and on the streets.’ Of course, I like this reminder that there are stories behind each work and its artist.

Even the kid carving ‘Praise Satin’ into a table has a story, possibly a rather interesting or disturbing one.

Breaking the Rules

Street art and graffiti give people who might otherwise feel ignored—young people, sometimes minorities, possibly lower socioeconomic status—a voice in their community. Using that voice is often an act of rebellion, of courage, and as writers we can emulate that.

Even while there are more and more street art festivals, many artists feel the best, most striking work is done unsupervised and perhaps illegally. Perhaps that’s because the most important things are worth fighting for. Especially these days, when the spectre of censorship looms, we writers should take heart at that.

For more stories about the role graffiti and street art play around the world, check out this feature on The Nature of Cities. Are there any special works of unconventional art near you? What’s the story behind them?